Sunday, March 31, 2019
‘Race-Biased Dragnet’: DNA From 360 Black Men Was Collected to Solve Vetrano Murder, Defense Lawyers Say - The New York Times
"When Karina Vetrano was found beaten and strangled in a Queens park nearly three years ago, the New York Police Department carried out one of the most intense and extensive manhunts in the agency’s recent history.
But defense lawyers for the man charged in the killing, Chanel Lewis, are now contending that the police swept up hundreds of black men in a “race-biased dragnet” before settling on him — information they argue should have been turned over to them before trial. They said they learned only recently that the police took DNA samples from at least 360 black men who had been previously taken into custody in parts of Queens and Brooklyn.
Six months after taking the DNA samples, investigators testified that they finally found a match in Mr. Lewis, whom detectives approached on a police lieutenant’s intuition. Mr. Lewis, now 22, confessed to the crime, though he later claimed he was coerced. His first trial ended with a hung jury.
As Mr. Lewis’s second trial is coming to a close, his defense lawyers are raising questions about whether prosecutors withheld critical evidence about the wide genetic canvass, as well as whether the police initially suspected that two white men had killed Ms. Vetrano. The lawyers said they will file motions in State Supreme Court in Queens on Monday, seeking a hearing to determine if prosecutors hid evidence favorable to Mr. Lewis..."
‘Race-Biased Dragnet’: DNA From 360 Black Men Was Collected to Solve Vetrano Murder, Defense Lawyers Say - The New York Times
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Friday, March 29, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
The Liberal Case Against Bernie | The Nation
"The Liberal Case Against Bernie
With a dangerous lunatic in the White House, voting for Sanders is too big a risk.
By Eric Alterman
"Bernie Sanders speaks to the media on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on November 28, 2018. (REUTERS / Joshua Roberts)
Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy poses a conundrum for progressives. Not since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt said that he “welcomed” the hatred of corporate interests, has a serious presidential candidate offered so aggressive a challenge to the conservative powers that be. At the same time, however, a dangerous lunatic is president of the United States, and Sanders, of all the major Democratic contenders, is the one who will make Donald Trump’s reelection most likely. Eight years of a Trump presidency could mean the end of meaningful democracy in the United States, along with many of the rights that women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and others now take for granted.
Let me clarify: I’ve been a fan and supporter of Sanders ever since he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981. I was honored to be asked to testify before him in Congress years ago, and I voted for him in the New York presidential primary in 2016. I did so, however, not because I imagined he might win the nomination, but because I hoped that a strong showing by Sanders would help wake up Hillary Clinton to the importance of addressing economic inequality, and also to honor his brave criticism of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
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I was wrong. Sanders turned so negative toward Clinton that it hurt her in the general election. Even though he campaigned for her after he lost the nomination, roughly 12 percent of Sanders’s supporters switched to Trump, and enough of the rest supported Jill Stein’s kamikaze candidacy that it helped tip key states to Trump.
Sanders has now hired two press aides, David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray. The former had recently devoted himself to harsh Twitter attacks on Sanders’s potential rivals for the nomination. (Sirota has since deleted his Twitter archives.) The latter, also a frequent and combative tweeter, ended up a Stein supporter in 2016. Their hires appear to presage a take-no-prisoners campaign that could conceivably put Sanders over the top in the primary while also alienating most of the electorate.
In a poll of likely primary voters in the battleground state of Wisconsin, Sanders crushed the field with a 40 percent showing. But he already has a 45 percent unfavorable rating among all voters, up from 36 percent three years ago. His favorable number is down to 46 percent, 13 points lower than it used to be. And this is before the Trump/Fox News/Breitbart/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube right-wing noise machine turns its poisonous attention to him—to say nothing of Wall Street and all the other industries that will no doubt strenuously oppose him.
Sanders today insists on calling himself a “socialist,” but he no longer holds most of the positions historically associated with socialism. He should know this because he was a serious socialist between 1972 and 1976, when he ran and lost in four statewide Vermont races on the Liberty Union Party line. His platform called for the nationalization of pretty much every industry in America, together with a 100 percent income tax on America’s top earners. And Sanders was still a socialist in 1980, when he served as an elector for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which favored the abolition of the US military budget and proclaimed itself in solidarity with both Cuba and Iran at a time when the latter held over 52 Americans hostage.
I held some of the same views myself as a young man, but I am not running for president. And if I ever thought I might, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to attend a rally in 1985 in Managua, Nicaragua, with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die,” while the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, condemned my country’s “state terrorism” (accurate as the term was).
I mention this appearance because, according to reporting by journalist Kurt Eichenwald, Republicans have it and similar events on tape. They also have binders full of statements made in support of the kind of socialism that Sanders backed before he became what he is today: a typical New Deal–style liberal or European social democrat. Much of Sanders’s agenda is popular, but calling yourself a “socialist” is, according to recent polls, a losing proposition—74 percent of independent voters disapprove of it, with just 9 percent approving.
Sanders consistently speaks of the “political revolution” that he expects will carry his campaign across the finish line. He is, however, a candidate with views that, like mine, are to the left of the American “center,” wherever that may be. He is also a candidate who will be 79 years old in January 2021; who refuses (thus far) to release his tax returns and thereby robs the Democrats of a potent weapon against Trump; and who cannot even bring himself to become a member of the party whose presidential nomination he seeks. (Insert Groucho Marx joke here.) And I’ve not even mentioned his weakness, relative to Clinton, with crucial Democratic constituencies like African Americans and women. We can also count out the many voters who are uncomfortable with criticism of Israel (much as I admire Sanders for that).
A Sanders nomination would, I fear, deliver the country to Trump. It would depress turnout among all the groups I mentioned; increase support for the likely spoiler in the race, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz; and keep a significant number of swing voters in Trump’s column. Additionally, some of the moms and grandmas who make up the backbone of the #Resistance told researcher Theda Skocpol that, owing to Sanders’s harsh treatment of Clinton in the 2016 election, they might sit out 2020 if he’s the nominee.
Someday, all of this may change, and I—or more likely my daughter—will be able to vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president. Today, however, with Trump as president, Democrats cannot afford to bet America’s future on an invisible “revolution.” Here’s hoping they realize this soon enough to protect the progressive achievements of the past from the destruction and devastation that would be the inevitable result of four more years of Donald Trump."
The Liberal Case Against Bernie | The Nation
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General - The New York Times
"Only a handful of law enforcement officials have seen the report, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said. She said a few members of Mr. Mueller’s team would remain to close down the office. Mr. Mueller will not recommend any new charges be filed, a senior Justice Department official said.
Mr. Barr told congressional leaders that he would decide what to release after consulting with Mr. Mueller and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who has overseen the investigation from the start. A White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, “The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course.” She added that the White House had not seen or been briefed on the report, although officials were notified that Mr. Mueller had delivered it shortly before Congress was notified.
In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, warned Mr. Barr not to allow the White House a “sneak preview” of the report before the public views it. They said that he should both make the full report public and share Mr. Mueller’s underlying evidence with Congress.
“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they said.
Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs within the Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents suggest that investigators are still examining why the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate whom prosecutors said was tied to Russian intelligence."
Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General - The New York Times
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Monday, March 18, 2019
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Puzzling number of men tied to Ferguson protests have died
"FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Two young men were found dead inside torched cars. Three others died of apparent suicides. Another collapsed on a bus, his death ruled an overdose.
Six deaths, all involving men with connections to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, drew attention on social media and speculation in the activist community that something sinister was at play.
Police say there is no evidence the deaths have anything to do with the protests stemming from a white police officer’s fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, and that only two were homicides with no known link to the protests.
But some activists say their concerns about a possible connection arise out of a culture of fear that persists in Ferguson 4 ½ years after Brown’s death, citing threats — mostly anonymous — that protest leaders continue to receive.
The Rev. Darryl Gray said he found a box inside his car. When the bomb squad arrived, no explosives were found but a 6-foot (1.8-meter) python was inside.
“Everybody is on pins and needles,” Gray said of his fellow activists.
No arrests have been made in the two homicides. St. Louis County police spokesman Shawn McGuire said witnesses have simply refused to come forward, leaving detectives with no answers for why the men were targeted.
“We don’t believe either one was connected to each other,” McGuire said, but adding, “It’s tough to come up with a motive without a suspect.”
Ferguson erupted in protests in August 2014 after officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Brown during a street confrontation. Brown was unarmed, but Wilson said he fired in self-defense when the black teenager came at him menacingly.
A grand jury declined to charge Wilson in November 2014, prompting one of the most violent nights of demonstrations, and one of the first activist deaths.
Deandre Joshua’s body was found inside a burned car blocks from the protest. The 20-year-old was shot in the head before the car was torched.
Darren Seals, shown on video comforting Brown’s mother that same night, met an almost identical fate two years later. The 29-year-old’s bullet-riddled body was found inside a burning car in September 2016.
Four others also died, three of them ruled suicides.
— MarShawn McCarrel of Columbus, Ohio, shot himself in February 2016 outside the front door of the Ohio Statehouse, police said. He had been active in Ferguson.
— Edward Crawford Jr., 27, fatally shot himself in May 2017 after telling acquaintances he had been distraught over personal issues, police said. A photo of Crawford firing a tear gas canister back at police during a Ferguson protest was part of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage.
— In October, 24-year-old Danye Jones was found hanging from a tree in the yard of his north St. Louis County home. His mother, Melissa McKinnies, was active in Ferguson and posted on Facebook after her son’s death, “They lynched my baby.” But the death was ruled a suicide.
— Bassem Masri, a 31-year-old Palestinian American who frequently livestreamed video of Ferguson demonstrations, was found unresponsive on a bus in November and couldn’t be revived. Toxicology results released in February showed he died of an overdose of fentanyl.
The Ferguson protests added momentum to the national Black Lives Matter movement, but they also generated resentment from people angered by TV footage of protesters hurling rocks and insults at police. Amid lingering anger, activists and observers say that while they see no clear connection between the deaths and the protests, they can’t help but wonder about the thoroughness of the investigations.
“These protesters and their deaths may not be a high priority for (police) since there is this antagonistic relationship,” Washington University sociologist Odis Johnson said. “I think there is a need for them to have a greater sense of urgency.”
Activists say that in the years since the protests, they have been targeted in dangerous ways.
“Something is happening,” said Cori Bush, a frequent leader of the Ferguson protests. “I’ve been vocal about the things that I’ve experienced and still experience — the harassment, the intimidation, the death threats, the death attempts.”
Bush said her car has been run off the road, her home has been vandalized, and in 2014 someone shot a bullet into her car, narrowly missing her daughter, who was 13 at the time.
She suspects white supremacists or police sympathizers. Living under constant threat is exhausting, she said, but she won’t give in.
“They shut us up and they win,” Bush said.
It’s unclear if residual stress from the protests or harassment contributed to the suicides, but Johnson said many activists feel a sense of hopelessness.
“This has to have a big impact on their mental health,” Johnson said. “For many, law enforcement is not a recourse. Many times law enforcement is not on their side.”
Experts say the deaths also are indicative of a concern at the core of the protests — the underlying difficulty of life for young people of color. Five of the men who died were blacks in their 20s.
Black St. Louis County residents are three times more likely than whites to be poor, often meaning they lack adequate health insurance that could allow them to better address not only physical ailments but mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
They also tend to live in areas with higher crime rates. The 2010 U.S. census showed that while people who live in wealthy and mostly white western St. Louis County can expect to live well into their 80s, life expectancy in parts of mostly black north St. Louis County reaches only into the 60s. Life expectancy in Kinloch, a few miles from Ferguson, is 56.
Forty-five of the county’s 60 homicide victims last year were black in a county where less than a quarter of the population is black, according to police statistics.
“Here in St. Louis, unfortunately, we have allowed the culture of crime and violence to morph into dimensions that anybody’s at risk any day, any time,” said James Clark of the nonprofit Better Family Life."
Puzzling number of men tied to Ferguson protests have died
Friday, March 15, 2019
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Monday, March 11, 2019
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Saturday, March 09, 2019
Friday, March 08, 2019
Opinion | Ilhan Omar’s Microaggression - The New York Times
Even some of her critics have to admit that the attacks on her are ridiculous and no one is saying what she is saying is not true.
"The identity politics fiasco surrounding Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been excruciating. Half of me is angry at her. The other half is furious for her.
Among the most basic anti-Semitic tropes are these: Jews employ semi-occult powers to control world events; they manipulate hapless gentiles with their money; and Jews in the diaspora are disloyal to the countries in which they live. Omar, in the course of making perfectly valid criticisms of Israel and its most powerful American lobby, has invoked each of these tropes.
Twice now, she has publicly expressed regret for saying things that many Jews — including some who are quite far to the left on Israel — see as freighted with anti-Semitism, only to reignite public controversy with new insensitive comments. Most recently, while speaking on a panel last week, she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
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Writers I respect, including Paul Waldman at The Washington Post, have argued that there was nothing wrong with what Omar said, because she was criticizing those who demand that she show more fealty to Israel, rather than accusing Jews of dual loyalties. But even if you interpret her words that way, she’s committed what might be called, in another context, a series of microaggressions — inadvertent slights that are painful because they echo whole histories of trauma. I assume Omar has been reckless rather than malicious, but it is incumbent on her, as on any public person who wades into fraught sectarian debates, to speak with care. This doesn’t mean she should temper her criticism of Israel, just that she needs to stop giving ammunition to those who want to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
So I think Omar deserves criticism. Criticism, however, is not the right word for what she’s faced. As one of the first two Muslim women in Congress — and the first to wear a hijab — Omar has been subject to a terrifying campaign of racist vilification, including a poster in the rotunda of the West Virginia Capitol linking her to 9/11. She is treated as a dangerous foreign interloper in American politics and the embodiment of anti-Semitism, even though her Republican colleagues routinely demonstrate far worse anti-Jewish bigotry.
Earlier this week, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, accused Representative Jerry Nadler of doing the bidding of the wealthy liberal donor “Tom $teyer,” whose father was Jewish. (To be clear, this tweet counts both as inane AND anti-Semitic,” Nadler responded.) Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, once brought an internet troll who’d denied the Holocaust to the State of the Union. Omar gestured at the idea of dual loyalty, but Donald Trump, speaking to American Jews last December, referred to Israel as “your country.” Indeed, no president has done more to mainstream classically anti-Semitic ideas about an authentic volk at war with parasitical globalists. It’s maddening to watch men who’ve flirted with outright fascism — like former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka, who wore the medal of a Nazi-aligned Hungarian group to one of Trump’s inaugural balls — act like sanctimonious defenders of the Jews.
The point is not to excuse Omar by comparison. It’s to say that Omar said things that are offensive and that she’s the victim of a double standard. She’s been held up for unique opprobrium because, breaking with America’s foreign policy consensus, she empathizes with Palestinians more than Israelis. Representative Juan Vargas, a Democrat of California, gave the game away earlier this week when he tweeted, “It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community. Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable.”
House Democratic leaders have been widely panned for their handling of the Omar affair, but its contradictions put them in a near-impossible bind. To ignore her words would be to tolerate mild anti-Semitism, an unsavory proposition at any time, but especially now, when many Jews feel newly vulnerable in a country that’s long been a haven. To publicly rebuke her would mean joining in the over-the-top demonization of a black Muslim woman facing death threats. Ultimately, Democrats on Thursday settled on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim discrimination, and “bigotry against minorities,” a blandly inoffensive document that didn’t seem to satisfy anyone.
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As that resolution was being hashed out, The Hill published an interview with House Majority Whip James Clyburn that poured gasoline on a trash fire. Defending Omar, who spent four years of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp, he seemed to describe her suffering as more visceral than that of Jews. “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.’” Clyburn said. “It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.”
More from Opinion on Ilhan Omar and anti-Semitism:
Opinion | Bret Stephens: Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is DoingMarch 7, 2019
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman: Ilhan Omar, Aipac and MeMarch 6, 2019
Opinion: Anti-Semitism Charges Roil DemocratsMarch 7, 2019
I don’t doubt that Omar is living through a lot of pain, but minimizing the legacy of the Holocaust is never a good idea, particularly when your party is managing an internal crisis over anti-Semitism. For a moment I was frightened: with the country in the hands of a repugnant white nationalist, this is not the moment for Democrats to tear themselves apart over race and religion.
Then the voting on the anti-bigotry resolution started. Every Democrat present backed the resolution, but 23 Republicans voted against it. It was a reminder that while Democrats sometimes fail to live up to the ideals of multiethnic democracy, Republicans don’t seem to recognize those ideas at all. Omar needs to do better, but right now there’s still only one political party in America that is a safe place for hate.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn"
Opinion | Ilhan Omar’s Microaggression - The New York Times
Paul Manafort Is Sentenced to Less Than 4 Years in 1 of 2 Cases Against Him - The New York Times
Paul Manafort got off with far to easy a sentence given the scope of his wrongdoing and his unrepentant attitude. Young kids of color have are regularly sentenced for longer for swelling and ounce of marijuana. This is a disgrace but sadly not surprising. This is a central case of how color and economic privilege work together in America.
Paul Manafort Is Sentenced to Less Than 4 Years in 1 of 2 Cases Against Him - The New York Times
Paul Manafort Is Sentenced to Less Than 4 Years in 1 of 2 Cases Against Him - The New York Times
Thursday, March 07, 2019
Opinion | What if the Mueller Report Demands Bold Action? - The New York Times
By J.T. Smith II
Mr. Smith served as executive assistant to Attorney General Elliot Richardson in 1973.
"If Mueller’s findings compel legal action, the attorney general should reconsider the policy against indictment of a sitting president.
Mr. Smith served as executive assistant to Attorney General Elliot Richardson in 1973.
Reports that Robert Mueller will soon issue the findings of his investigation have brought a new urgency to the question of whether, assuming sufficient evidence exists, a president can be indicted while in office.
Most people take for granted that both Mr. Mueller and the new attorney general, William Barr, accept the current Justice Department legal position — reached in a 2000 opinion — that a sitting president cannot be indicted. In a June 2018 memo, Mr. Barr said that under “the Framers’ plan,” the “proper mechanism for policing the president’s” actions “is the political process — that is, the People, acting either directly, or through their elected representatives in Congress.”
Yet since 1973, the Justice Department has revisited its position five times on the question of indicting a sitting president and reached different conclusions. In fact, as executive assistant to President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot Richardson, I can speak to the circumstances that delivered that first opinion: The principal purpose of the 1973 Watergate-era legal opinion — which concluded that a sitting president cannot be indicted — was to aid in removal from office of a criminally tainted vice president, who, the memo concluded, could be indicted.
But it was not intended to set an ironclad precedent that would forever shape how a president might be treated.
My experience makes me believe that Attorney General Barr should reconsider Justice Department policy. If the evidence gathered by the Mueller investigation on the actions of the president and his advisers indicates a crime, an indictment might be the proper course to hold the president accountable. Further, the indictment policy does not stand in isolation: It has repercussions for a Mueller report and access to it for Congress and the American public.
The durability of the Office of Legal Counsel’s 1973 opinion is curious. It was prepared under extraordinarily stressful and unique circumstances — borne from the investigations that led to the resignations of Vice President Spiro Agnew that year and President Nixon in 1974.
In 1973, Vice President Agnew faced a grand jury investigation, mostly stemming from his tenure as governor of Maryland, into alleged bribery, extortion and tax evasion. Mr. Agnew resisted pressure to resign. Attorney General Richardson sought guidance on the indictment question in an effort to bring pressure on the vice president.
When the legal opinion was written, it was a very close question and was ultimately shaped by Mr. Richardson’s goal to remove the vice president from his office. The Office of Legal Counsel determined “there is no express provision in the Constitution which confers such immunity upon the President,” even though Article I, Section 6 provides for limited immunity for members of the legislature. (It also said, in reaching its conclusion, that there were “a number of policy factors that weigh heavily against” indicting a sitting president.)
Following the determination on vice presidents, Mr. Richardson obtained the indictment of Mr. Agnew, and rather than face a prolonged legal battle, the vice president pleaded no contest and resigned in 1973.
An often-overlooked facet of the Agnew case — but highly relevant to our circumstances today — was Mr. Richardson’s insistence that the vice president’s resignation and plea on a single count be accompanied by an extraordinary, publicly available 40-page summary of the criminal behavior involving Mr. Agnew that the Justice Department was prepared to prove at trial. Mr. Richardson believed, correctly, that a full recounting of Mr. Agnew’s shameful behavior would put to rest any contention by his supporters that he had been made a political victim.
Ten days after Mr. Agnew’s resignation, though, Mr. Richardson himself resigned, as part of the events leading up to the Saturday Night Massacre. In an effort to end the Watergate investigation, Mr. Nixon called for the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Mr. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than carry out that order.
Mr. Richardson, Mr. Cox and their successors also insisted upon access to White House evidence. They deeply appreciated the right and responsibility of Congress to exercise reasonable stewardship regarding the behavior of leadership of the executive branch.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation has brought us to face similar questions of institutional integrity and transparency for the American public. If Mr. Barr determines that Mr. Mueller’s findings compel legal action, he should reconsider the policy against indictment of a sitting president.
But if Mr. Barr holds to the view that a president’s actions should be policed by the political and not criminal process, it will be imperative that he share a Mueller report with Congress and, to the extent practicable, with the public, redacting only information that is classified or otherwise prohibited by statute.
In light of the gravity of our circumstances, it would be timely and appropriate for the Justice Department to reconsider the shaky policy regarding indictability of a sitting president and provide Congress and the public with the Mr. Mueller’s full findings and conclusions. Only through sunlight and transparency can we preserve confidence in our national institutions and leadership."
Opinion | What if the Mueller Report Demands Bold Action? - The New York Times
Why Did Four Top Democrats Just Say No to 2020? - The New York Times
"Call them the announcements that weren’t.
Over the past two days, Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor; Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general; and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon officially declared … drumroll, please … that they would not be running for president in 2020. A fourth Democrat, Hillary Clinton, also said “I’m not running” to a New York City television station.
Such is the state of Democratic fervor to challenge President Trump that the party now has a subset of politicians: the almost-rans.
Mr. Bloomberg said he felt his time and personal fortune would be better used promoting immigration reform, gun control and climate change. Mr. Holder wants to continue focusing on ending gerrymandering. Mrs. Clinton, who never seriously pursued a third primary bid, said she would keep “standing up for what I believe.” And Mr. Merkley will seek a third term in the Senate in 2020, after the State Legislature rejected his request to allow him to run for both positions simultaneously.
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“I have felt like I’m sitting on a fence, and I’m getting really uncomfortable sitting on those pickets,” said Mr. Merkley in an interview. “At some point, you just have to say, ‘O.K., I’ve weighed it and reweighed and here’s the right thing to do.’”
But there are also other challenges and obstacles facing potential 2020 candidates right now.
The Oxygen Problem
There are already 14 Democrats running for president, and there is a good chance that a 15th one could enter in the coming weeks: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who would take up a significant share of the ever-thinning oxygen in the packed race. Another big name, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, is also expected to announce his presidential intentions soon.
Mr. Biden and Mr. O’Rourke would add enormous pressure to the competition among the candidates for aides, donations, volunteers, media attention and voter support. The primary race has already created at least one star, with Senator Kamala Harris, of California, attracting enthusiastic admirers who regularly express the hope that they are witnessing the party’s “next Obama.” While the four Democrats who just said no to 2020 did not appear intimidated by a Harris, Biden or O’Rourke candidacy, building an organization and commanding attention only gets harder amid multiple star candidates.
There’s also the looming deadline of March 31, when candidates must report their first quarter finances to the Federal Election Commission. Those returns will be scrutinized as an early show of relative strength — or weakness — in the race.
“There is a sense that if you’re going to build a presidential team, if you’re going to build the fund-raising base, you’re going to have to work night and day, and you can’t wait forever to do that,” said Mr. Merkley. “There’s a compelling sense of many people feeling like you’ve got to decide by the end of the first quarter.”
Candidates who can self-finance their campaigns, like Mr. Bloomberg, would still face a fierce competition to be heard, not only among others in the race but amid intensifying efforts by Democrats on Capitol Hill to investigate the Trump administration.
Even the first Democratic debate in June doesn’t hold the promise of much airtime: Depending on how many candidates qualify, the event could become a two-night affair, with candidates assigned a spot based on a random drawing.
The Billionaire Problem
It didn’t go unnoticed by Mr. Bloomberg that he was the last billionaire considering a bid for the Democratic nomination. Tom Steyer, the California liberal activist, opted against running earlier this year, and if the former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz runs, he has said he would do so as an independent.
Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general, said he wants to focus on his efforts to end gerrymandering.
Photo by: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
“I believe I would defeat Donald Trump in a general election,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote in a column published Tuesday. “But I am cleareyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.”
Populist progressives like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made combating the influence of money in politics a core message of their presidential candidacies — arguments that might have proved challenging for Mr. Bloomberg, whose aides said he would spend at least $500 million of his own fortune to defeat President Trump in 2020.
Mr. Bloomberg’s moderate, pro-business record and generally favorable view of Wall Street would likely also have posed problems in a party that has shifted left on economic issues like taxing the rich and regulating big banks. Some of those arguments could have posed challenges for Mrs. Clinton, too, who spent decades cultivating a network of high-dollar donors and close relationships with Wall Street to fund her campaigns.
The Party Problem
Democrats lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures and governorships during President Barack Obama’s two terms in the Oval Office, and those defeats found increased scrutiny once Mr. Trump ascended into the presidency and the Democrats held diminished political power.
In the three years since, grass-roots organizations and Democratic Party leaders have pledged to take recruitment and support for nonpresidential races more seriously, leading some candidates who had considered a run for president to look further down the ticket. In Mr. Merkley’s video announcing that he would not run, he said, “We need both strong leadership in the Oval Office and strong leadership in the Senate,” a sentiment that was met with applause on social media. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who lost her bid for governor in 2018, is being heavily recruited for another statewide race in Georgia. . Mr. O’Rourke, the charismatic Texas Democrat who is expected to run for president after losing a Senate bid in 2018, has also faced several calls to focus his energy at home.
[Who’s in? Who’s out? Keep up with the Democratic field with our candidate tracker.]
Jeff Hauser, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, tweeted that other Democrats should take a page from Mr. Merkley’s “principled and realistic playbook” and run for Senate. “We need to address the climate crisis, confirm judges & Justices, and in general begin the process of De-Trumpification,” he wrote.
Senator Jeff Merkley will run for re-election in 2020. Oregon’s State Legislature rejected his request to allow him to run for both president and Senate simultaneously.
Photo by: Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press
Mr. Bloomberg’s non-announcement announcement included plans to invest further in climate activism, which is another way Democrats are choosing to focus on the party’s overall health. Mr. Steyer decided he would instead put his money behind efforts to impeach Mr. Trump.
Both Mr. Steyer and Mr. Bloomberg said that, unlike Mr. Schultz, they would not consider a third-party run, which could risk helping Mr. Trump win re-election by siphoning votes from the Democratic candidate.
The Newness Problem
Another thing the four non-candidates have in common: They all represent the back end of a rapidly changing Democratic Party.
After their defeat in the 2016 presidential election, a more liberal, more uncompromising wing of the party begin to emerge, desperate to throw off the institutional connections to more centrist figures like the Clintons and Mr. Obama. It was this wing that has helped move presidential candidates further to the left, pushing them to embrace policies like “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal and the rejection of corporate PAC money.
The new crop of Democrats are also more keen to talk about the importance of a candidate’s identity, particularly millennials and nonwhite activists who are driving grass-roots changes among Democrats — “Anybody But a White Guy 2020,” reads a popular sign at presidential rallies. And youth-led social movements about sexual harassment, racial justice, and gun control in recent years have forced Democrats to answer uncomfortable questions about the lack of equitable representation among their caucus in terms of race, gender, and class.
Figures such as Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Holder would have been an ideological mismatch for this emerging leftist voice. Mrs. Clinton already struggled to appease the party’s left flank during her 2016 run, and the litmus test issues have only moved further from her core policy center since. Social justice activists were raring to challenge Mr. Holder on his record on police reform as head of Department of Justice.
Even Mr. Sanders seemed caught off guard during a recent appearance on The Breakfast Club, the urban radio show targeted to millennials, when a host asked him, “Do we need another white guy as president?”
Why Did Four Top Democrats Just Say No to 2020? - The New York Times
Wednesday, March 06, 2019
Trump Dismisses 81 House Document Requests. Here’s Where They Went. - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — President Trump dismissed on Tuesday an expansive document request by House Democrats scrutinizing whether he obstructed justice or abused power as nothing more than a political sideshow — and he suggested the White House might not cooperate.
Citing 81 document request letters dispatched Monday to Trump associates by the House Judiciary Committee, the president called Democrats’ efforts “a disgrace to our country” and seemingly implied — incorrectly — that President Barack Obama refused to comply with Congress’s demands under similar circumstances.
“Essentially what they are saying is the campaign begins,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “Instead of doing infrastructure, instead of doing health care, instead of doing so many things they should be doing, they want to play games.”
Mr. Trump can instruct executive branch agencies to shield key evidence if he chooses. But it is unlikely that he alone can shake off the dragnet stretched across Trump world by Democrats, most systematically by the House Judiciary Committee this week. Detailed requests were made by the panel’s chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, not just to the White House and key government agencies, but to private companies and individuals tied to Mr. Trump’s businesses, campaign and administration. More will follow."
Trump Dismisses 81 House Document Requests. Here’s Where They Went. - The New York Times
In the Middle of His Official Business, Trump Took the Time to Send Checks to Michael Cohen - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — On a busy day at the White House, President Trump hosted senators to talk about tax cuts, accused a Democratic congresswoman of distorting his condolence call to a soldier’s widow and suffered another court defeat for his travel ban targeting Muslim countries.
And at some point on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2017, Mr. Trump took the time to sign a $35,000 check to his lawyer, who had made hush payments to prevent alleged sexual misconduct from being exposed before the 2016 presidential election. It was one of 11 occasions that Mr. Trump or his trust cut such checks, six of which were provided this week to The New York Times..."
In the Middle of His Official Business, Trump Took the Time to Send Checks to Michael Cohen - The New York Times
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
Monday, March 04, 2019
Trump’s Grip Shows Signs of Slipping as Senate Prepares to Block Wall Emergency - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, conceded on Monday that he could not stave off final passage of a resolution overturning President Trump’s national emergency declaration, setting up a rebuke to Mr. Trump amid signs that the president’s grip even on his own party in Congress may be slipping.
With Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky joining three other Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — in announcing he would support the measure, Democrats now have the 51 votes they need to secure passage and to force Mr. Trump to issue the first veto of his presidency.
Mr. McConnell is exploring whether he can amend the House-passed resolution of disapproval, to send it back to the House and slow its trip to the president’s desk. Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski are both sponsors of a separate resolution, virtually identical to the House resolution, introduced in the Senate last week.
And while a veto is highly unlikely to be overturned, the congressional majority that forces it will stand as a powerful rejection of the tactics Mr. Trump has used to fulfill his top campaign promise to build a wall on the southern border — and will apparently be the first time since passage of the National Emergencies Act of 1976 that Congress has voted to overturn an emergency declaration."
Trump’s Grip Shows Signs of Slipping as Senate Prepares to Block Wall Emergency - The New York Times
Opinion | Reckoning With Violence - The New York Times
"By Michelle Alexander, www.nytimes.comView OriginalMarch 3rd, 2019
We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal.
When Chicago’s police chief, Eddie Johnson, looked out at the sea of journalists to share the breaking news that Jussie Smollett, a well-known and beloved actor, had allegedly staged a violent racist and homophobic attack against himself, he said with great emotion: “Guys, I look out into the crowd, I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention.”
Chicago is besieged by horrific levels of violence, including thousands of shootings and hundreds of homicides each year. More than 500 people were killed in 2018, down from 664 in 2017. This ongoing tragedy cannot be blamed on any lack of aggressiveness on the part of law enforcement. Indeed, if wars on crime and drugs, militarized policing, “get tough” sentencing policies, torture of suspects, and perpetual monitoring and surveillance of the poorest, most crime-ridden communities actually worked to keep people safe, Chicago would be one of the safest cities in the world.
Despite the abysmal failure of “get tough” strategies to break cycles of violence in cities like Chicago, reformers of our criminal justice system in recent years have largely avoided the subject of violence, instead focusing their energy and resources on overhauling our nation’s drug laws and reducing penalties for nonviolent offenses.
It’s not difficult to understand why. After all, violent crime was used by politicians for decades to rationalize “get tough” rhetoric, declarations of war, harsh mandatory minimum sentencing, and a prison-building boom unlike anything the world has ever seen. The tide has turned somewhat, but reformers are proceeding cautiously, reaching first for the low-hanging fruit.
Drug law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has caused catastrophic harm. Nationally, the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional control outside prison walls — on probation or parole. More than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second-class status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.
And yet, as Danielle Sered points out in her profoundly necessary book, “Until We Reckon,” if we fail to face violence in our communities honestly, courageously and with profound compassion for the survivors — many of whom are also perpetrators of harm — our nation will never break its addiction to caging human beings.
Fifty-four percent of the people currently held in state prisons have been convicted of a crime classified as violent. We will never slash our prison population by 50 percent — the goal of a number of current campaigns — much less get back to levels of incarceration that we had before the race to incarcerate began in the early 1980s, without addressing the one issue most reformers avoid: violence.
Reckoning with violence in a meaningful way does not mean “getting tough” in the way that phrase has been used for decades; nor does it mean being “smart on crime” to the extent that phrase has become shorthand for being “tough” on violent crime but “soft” on nonviolent crime — a formulation that continues to be embraced by some so-called “progressive prosecutors” today.
As Ms. Sered explains in her book, drawing on her experience working with hundreds of survivors and perpetrators of violence in Brooklyn and the Bronx, imprisonment isn’t just an inadequate tool; it’s often enormously counterproductive — leaving survivors and their communities worse off.
Survivors themselves know this. That’s why fully 90 percent of survivors in New York City, when given the chance to choose whether they want the person who harmed them incarcerated or in a restorative justice process — one that offers support to survivors while empowering them to help decide how perpetrators of violence can repair the damage they’ve done — choose the latter and opt to use the services of Ms. Sered’s nonprofit organization, Common Justice.
Ms. Sered launched Common Justice in an effort to give survivors of violence — like herself — a meaningful pathway to accountability without perpetuating the harms endemic to mass incarceration. As a restorative justice program, it offers a survivor-centered accountability process that “gives those directly impacted by acts of violence the opportunity to shape what repair will look like, and, in the case of the responsible party, to carry out that repair instead of going to prison.” The people who choose to participate are victims of serious violent felonies — people who have been shot, stabbed or robbed — and who decide that they would prefer to get answers from the person who harmed them, be heard in a restorative justice circle, help to devise an accountability plan, and receive comprehensive victim services, rather than send the person who harmed them to prison.
Ninety percent is a stunning figure considering everything we’ve been led to believe that survivors actually want. For years, we’ve been told that victims of violence want nothing more than for the people who hurt them to be locked up and treated harshly. It is true that some survivors do want revenge or retribution, especially in the immediate aftermath of the crime. Ms. Sered is emphatic that rage is not pathological and a desire for revenge is not blameworthy; both are normal and can be important to the healing process, much as denial and anger are normal stages of grief.
But she also stresses that the number of people who are interested only in revenge or punishment is greatly exaggerated. After all, survivors are almost never offered real choices. Usually when we ask victims “Do you want incarceration?” what we’re really asking is “Do you want something or nothing?” And when any of us are hurt, and when our families and communities are hurting, we want something rather than nothing. In many oppressed communities, drug treatment, good schools, economic investment, job training, trauma and grief support are not available options. Restorative justice is not an option. The only thing on offer is prisons, prosecutors and police.
But what happens, Ms. Sered wondered, if instead of asking, “Do you want something or nothing?” we started asking “Do you want this intervention or that prison?” It turns out, when given a real choice, very few survivors choose prison as their preferred response.
This is not because survivors, as a group, are especially merciful. To the contrary, they’re pragmatic. They know the criminal justice system will almost certainly fail to deliver what they want and need most to overcome their pain and trauma. More than 95 percent of cases end in plea bargains negotiated by lawyers behind the scenes. Given the system’s design, survivors know the system cannot be trusted to validate their suffering, give them answers or even a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Nor can it be trusted to keep them or others safe.
In fact, many victims find that incarceration actually makes them feel less safe. They worry that others will be angry with them for reporting the crime and retaliate, or fear what will happen when the person eventually returns home. Many believe, for good reason, that incarceration will likely make the person worse, not better — a frightening prospect when they’re likely to encounter the person again when they’re back in the neighborhood.
As one woman whose 14-year-old son had been badly beaten and robbed explained to Ms. Sered, “When I first found out about this, I wanted the young man to drown to death. And then I wanted him to burn to death. And then I realized as a mother that I don’t want either of those things. I want him to drown in a river of fire.” But when she reflected on the fact that the young man who harmed her son would eventually return home from prison and cross paths with her children again, she said, “I have to ask myself: When that day comes, do I want that young man to have been upstate or do I want him to have been with y’all?”
People gathered in Garfield Park and other Chicago neighborhoods in May 2016, as a plea against violence.
Photo by: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The restorative circle, a meeting during which responsible parties sit with those they have harmed (or surrogates who take their place), a trained facilitator, and people who support both parties, is central to the process. It offers those affected by a crime with the power and opportunity to ask questions, as well as describe their needs and the ways they've been harmed. Ultimately, the parties strive to reach agreement about what the responsible party can do to make things as right as possible. The circle can be transformative for both survivors and those who’ve caused harm. In Ms. Sered’s experience, survivors not only want answers to factual questions, they want acknowledgment of their suffering and the moral wrongs. They want to be able to say: “How dare you? My brother was killed the year before you stabbed me. Can you imagine how it felt to my mother to get the call from the hospital that I was unconscious in the E.R. and had been stabbed?” Sered explains.
Witnessing the pain and anguish of survivors, and taking full responsibility for what they’ve done by committing to specific actions to repair themselves and others, has a far greater impact on those who’ve committed harm than we might imagine. One young man, who had been a gang member since he was 8 years old, could not leave the building after participating in a restorative circle with Common Justice because he was shaking so badly after admitting the harm he had done. He asked staff members, “Can I stay in your office for a few minutes before I leave?” When asked to explain, he said, “You know, for all I’ve done and all that’s been done to me, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a real apology before. Do you think I did all right? Pardon my language, that is the scariest shit I ever did.”
A growing body of research strongly supports the anecdotal evidence that restorative justice programs increase the odds of safety, reduce recidivism and alleviate trauma. “Until We Reckon” cites studies showing that survivors report 80 to 90 percent rates of satisfaction with restorative processes, as compared to 30 percent for traditional court systems.
Common Justice's success rate is high: Only 7 percent of responsible parties have been terminated from the program for a new crime. And it’s not alone in successfully applying restorative justice principles. Numerous organizations — such as Community Justice for Youth Institute and Project NIA in Chicago; the Insight Prison Project in San Quentin; the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore; and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth — are doing so in communities, schools, and criminal justice settings from coast-to-coast.
In 2016, the Alliance for Safety and Justice conducted the first national poll of crime survivors and the results are consistent with the emerging trend toward restorative justice. The majority said they “believe that time in prison makes people more likely to commit another crime rather than less likely.” Sixty-nine percent preferred holding people accountable through options beyond prison, such as mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation, community supervision and public service. Survivors’ support for alternatives to incarceration was even higher than among the general public.
Survivors are right to question incarceration as a strategy for violence reduction. Violence is driven by shame, exposure to violence, isolation and an inability to meet one’s economic needs — all of which are core features of imprisonment. Perhaps most importantly, according to Ms. Sered, “Nearly everyone who has committed violence first survived it,” and studies indicate that experiencing violence is the greater predictor of committing it. Caging and isolating a person who’s already been damaged by violence is hardly a recipe for positive transformation.
That said, Ms. Sered makes clear that she doesn’t believe that having been a victim of crime excuses acts of violence in any way: “When we hurt someone, we incur an obligation. Period.” In fact, it seems her greatest complaint about our system of mass incarceration is that it fails to take accountability seriously. Our criminal injustice system lets people off the hook, as they aren’t obligated to answer the victims’ questions, listen to them, honor their pain, express genuine remorse, or do what they can to repair the harm they’ve done. They’re not required to take steps to heal themselves or address their own trauma, so they’re less likely to harm others in the future. The only thing prison requires is that people stay in their cages and somehow endure the isolation and violence of captivity. Prison deprives everyone concerned — victims and those who have caused harm, as well as impacted families and communities — the opportunity to heal, honor their own humanity, and to break cycles of violence that have destroyed far too many lives.
Ms. Sered acknowledges that we, as a society, are not yet prepared to apply restorative and transformative justice principles to all crimes of violence. Some people do need to be separated in order to keep others safe. But if we invest our resources in the healing, restoration and rebuilding of relationships and communities — and stop pretending that caging people on a massive scale makes our communities safer — we just might discover that we are capable of reckoning with one another."
Opinion | Reckoning With Violence - The New York Times
Opinion | Reckoning With Violence - The New York Times
"By Michelle Alexander, www.nytimes.comView OriginalMarch 3rd, 2019
We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal.
When Chicago’s police chief, Eddie Johnson, looked out at the sea of journalists to share the breaking news that Jussie Smollett, a well-known and beloved actor, had allegedly staged a violent racist and homophobic attack against himself, he said with great emotion: “Guys, I look out into the crowd, I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention.”
Chicago is besieged by horrific levels of violence, including thousands of shootings and hundreds of homicides each year. More than 500 people were killed in 2018, down from 664 in 2017. This ongoing tragedy cannot be blamed on any lack of aggressiveness on the part of law enforcement. Indeed, if wars on crime and drugs, militarized policing, “get tough” sentencing policies, torture of suspects, and perpetual monitoring and surveillance of the poorest, most crime-ridden communities actually worked to keep people safe, Chicago would be one of the safest cities in the world.
Despite the abysmal failure of “get tough” strategies to break cycles of violence in cities like Chicago, reformers of our criminal justice system in recent years have largely avoided the subject of violence, instead focusing their energy and resources on overhauling our nation’s drug laws and reducing penalties for nonviolent offenses.
It’s not difficult to understand why. After all, violent crime was used by politicians for decades to rationalize “get tough” rhetoric, declarations of war, harsh mandatory minimum sentencing, and a prison-building boom unlike anything the world has ever seen. The tide has turned somewhat, but reformers are proceeding cautiously, reaching first for the low-hanging fruit.
Drug law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has caused catastrophic harm. Nationally, the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional control outside prison walls — on probation or parole. More than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second-class status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.
And yet, as Danielle Sered points out in her profoundly necessary book, “Until We Reckon,” if we fail to face violence in our communities honestly, courageously and with profound compassion for the survivors — many of whom are also perpetrators of harm — our nation will never break its addiction to caging human beings.
Fifty-four percent of the people currently held in state prisons have been convicted of a crime classified as violent. We will never slash our prison population by 50 percent — the goal of a number of current campaigns — much less get back to levels of incarceration that we had before the race to incarcerate began in the early 1980s, without addressing the one issue most reformers avoid: violence.
Reckoning with violence in a meaningful way does not mean “getting tough” in the way that phrase has been used for decades; nor does it mean being “smart on crime” to the extent that phrase has become shorthand for being “tough” on violent crime but “soft” on nonviolent crime — a formulation that continues to be embraced by some so-called “progressive prosecutors” today.
As Ms. Sered explains in her book, drawing on her experience working with hundreds of survivors and perpetrators of violence in Brooklyn and the Bronx, imprisonment isn’t just an inadequate tool; it’s often enormously counterproductive — leaving survivors and their communities worse off.
Survivors themselves know this. That’s why fully 90 percent of survivors in New York City, when given the chance to choose whether they want the person who harmed them incarcerated or in a restorative justice process — one that offers support to survivors while empowering them to help decide how perpetrators of violence can repair the damage they’ve done — choose the latter and opt to use the services of Ms. Sered’s nonprofit organization, Common Justice.
Ms. Sered launched Common Justice in an effort to give survivors of violence — like herself — a meaningful pathway to accountability without perpetuating the harms endemic to mass incarceration. As a restorative justice program, it offers a survivor-centered accountability process that “gives those directly impacted by acts of violence the opportunity to shape what repair will look like, and, in the case of the responsible party, to carry out that repair instead of going to prison.” The people who choose to participate are victims of serious violent felonies — people who have been shot, stabbed or robbed — and who decide that they would prefer to get answers from the person who harmed them, be heard in a restorative justice circle, help to devise an accountability plan, and receive comprehensive victim services, rather than send the person who harmed them to prison.
Ninety percent is a stunning figure considering everything we’ve been led to believe that survivors actually want. For years, we’ve been told that victims of violence want nothing more than for the people who hurt them to be locked up and treated harshly. It is true that some survivors do want revenge or retribution, especially in the immediate aftermath of the crime. Ms. Sered is emphatic that rage is not pathological and a desire for revenge is not blameworthy; both are normal and can be important to the healing process, much as denial and anger are normal stages of grief.
But she also stresses that the number of people who are interested only in revenge or punishment is greatly exaggerated. After all, survivors are almost never offered real choices. Usually when we ask victims “Do you want incarceration?” what we’re really asking is “Do you want something or nothing?” And when any of us are hurt, and when our families and communities are hurting, we want something rather than nothing. In many oppressed communities, drug treatment, good schools, economic investment, job training, trauma and grief support are not available options. Restorative justice is not an option. The only thing on offer is prisons, prosecutors and police.
But what happens, Ms. Sered wondered, if instead of asking, “Do you want something or nothing?” we started asking “Do you want this intervention or that prison?” It turns out, when given a real choice, very few survivors choose prison as their preferred response.
This is not because survivors, as a group, are especially merciful. To the contrary, they’re pragmatic. They know the criminal justice system will almost certainly fail to deliver what they want and need most to overcome their pain and trauma. More than 95 percent of cases end in plea bargains negotiated by lawyers behind the scenes. Given the system’s design, survivors know the system cannot be trusted to validate their suffering, give them answers or even a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Nor can it be trusted to keep them or others safe.
In fact, many victims find that incarceration actually makes them feel less safe. They worry that others will be angry with them for reporting the crime and retaliate, or fear what will happen when the person eventually returns home. Many believe, for good reason, that incarceration will likely make the person worse, not better — a frightening prospect when they’re likely to encounter the person again when they’re back in the neighborhood.
As one woman whose 14-year-old son had been badly beaten and robbed explained to Ms. Sered, “When I first found out about this, I wanted the young man to drown to death. And then I wanted him to burn to death. And then I realized as a mother that I don’t want either of those things. I want him to drown in a river of fire.” But when she reflected on the fact that the young man who harmed her son would eventually return home from prison and cross paths with her children again, she said, “I have to ask myself: When that day comes, do I want that young man to have been upstate or do I want him to have been with y’all?”
People gathered in Garfield Park and other Chicago neighborhoods in May 2016, as a plea against violence.
Photo by: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The restorative circle, a meeting during which responsible parties sit with those they have harmed (or surrogates who take their place), a trained facilitator, and people who support both parties, is central to the process. It offers those affected by a crime with the power and opportunity to ask questions, as well as describe their needs and the ways they've been harmed. Ultimately, the parties strive to reach agreement about what the responsible party can do to make things as right as possible. The circle can be transformative for both survivors and those who’ve caused harm. In Ms. Sered’s experience, survivors not only want answers to factual questions, they want acknowledgment of their suffering and the moral wrongs. They want to be able to say: “How dare you? My brother was killed the year before you stabbed me. Can you imagine how it felt to my mother to get the call from the hospital that I was unconscious in the E.R. and had been stabbed?” Sered explains.
Witnessing the pain and anguish of survivors, and taking full responsibility for what they’ve done by committing to specific actions to repair themselves and others, has a far greater impact on those who’ve committed harm than we might imagine. One young man, who had been a gang member since he was 8 years old, could not leave the building after participating in a restorative circle with Common Justice because he was shaking so badly after admitting the harm he had done. He asked staff members, “Can I stay in your office for a few minutes before I leave?” When asked to explain, he said, “You know, for all I’ve done and all that’s been done to me, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a real apology before. Do you think I did all right? Pardon my language, that is the scariest shit I ever did.”
A growing body of research strongly supports the anecdotal evidence that restorative justice programs increase the odds of safety, reduce recidivism and alleviate trauma. “Until We Reckon” cites studies showing that survivors report 80 to 90 percent rates of satisfaction with restorative processes, as compared to 30 percent for traditional court systems.
Common Justice's success rate is high: Only 7 percent of responsible parties have been terminated from the program for a new crime. And it’s not alone in successfully applying restorative justice principles. Numerous organizations — such as Community Justice for Youth Institute and Project NIA in Chicago; the Insight Prison Project in San Quentin; the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore; and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth — are doing so in communities, schools, and criminal justice settings from coast-to-coast.
In 2016, the Alliance for Safety and Justice conducted the first national poll of crime survivors and the results are consistent with the emerging trend toward restorative justice. The majority said they “believe that time in prison makes people more likely to commit another crime rather than less likely.” Sixty-nine percent preferred holding people accountable through options beyond prison, such as mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation, community supervision and public service. Survivors’ support for alternatives to incarceration was even higher than among the general public.
Survivors are right to question incarceration as a strategy for violence reduction. Violence is driven by shame, exposure to violence, isolation and an inability to meet one’s economic needs — all of which are core features of imprisonment. Perhaps most importantly, according to Ms. Sered, “Nearly everyone who has committed violence first survived it,” and studies indicate that experiencing violence is the greater predictor of committing it. Caging and isolating a person who’s already been damaged by violence is hardly a recipe for positive transformation.
That said, Ms. Sered makes clear that she doesn’t believe that having been a victim of crime excuses acts of violence in any way: “When we hurt someone, we incur an obligation. Period.” In fact, it seems her greatest complaint about our system of mass incarceration is that it fails to take accountability seriously. Our criminal injustice system lets people off the hook, as they aren’t obligated to answer the victims’ questions, listen to them, honor their pain, express genuine remorse, or do what they can to repair the harm they’ve done. They’re not required to take steps to heal themselves or address their own trauma, so they’re less likely to harm others in the future. The only thing prison requires is that people stay in their cages and somehow endure the isolation and violence of captivity. Prison deprives everyone concerned — victims and those who have caused harm, as well as impacted families and communities — the opportunity to heal, honor their own humanity, and to break cycles of violence that have destroyed far too many lives.
Ms. Sered acknowledges that we, as a society, are not yet prepared to apply restorative and transformative justice principles to all crimes of violence. Some people do need to be separated in order to keep others safe. But if we invest our resources in the healing, restoration and rebuilding of relationships and communities — and stop pretending that caging people on a massive scale makes our communities safer — we just might discover that we are capable of reckoning with one another."
Opinion | Reckoning With Violence - The New York Times
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